Documents show agency officials applied extra scrutiny to nonprofits that critiqued ‘how the country is being run’

WASHINGTON 
At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials singled out for scrutiny not only groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name but also nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that the IRS field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status decided to focus on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those that were involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

The staffers in the Cincinnati field office were making high-level decisions on how to evaluate the groups because a decade ago the IRS assigned all applications to that unit. The IRS also eliminated an automatic after-the-fact review process Washington used to conduct such determinations.

The IRS came under withering attack from GOP lawmakers Sunday.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Barack Obama to condemn the effort.

“This is truly outrageous,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that even though White House press secretary Jay Carney has said the matter deserves an investigation, “the president needs to make crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable in America.”

In March 2012, then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, told Congress that the agency was not targeting conservative groups. On Sunday, the agency declined to answer questions about whether senior officials asked IRS exempt organizations division chief Lois Lerner and her staff in Cincinnati about this heightened scrutiny before testifying it did not take place.

“There has to be accountability for the people who did it,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Vista, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding, “and, quite frankly, up until a few days ago, there’s got to be accountability for people who were telling lies about it being done.”

The appendix of the inspector general’s report, which was requested by Issa’s committee and has yet to be publicly released, chronicles the extent to which the IRS’ exempt organizations division kept redefining what sort of “social welfare” groups it should single out for extra attention since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010. That decision allowed corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections as well as register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, as long as their “primary purpose” did not consist of targeting electoral candidates.

The number of political groups applying for tax-exempt status more than doubled in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, forcing agency officials to make a slew of determinations despite uncertainty about the category’s ambiguous definition.

On June 29, 2011, according to the documents, IRS staffers held a briefing with Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” She raised an objection and the agency adopted a more general set of standards. Lerner, who is a Democrat, is not a political appointee.